Task – Option 2 -Interview Project exploring diversity in life course

Interview a friend or family member who has lived in another country or culture for the entirety of at least one life stage. In your interview and subsequent write up, explore how cultural differences impacted their experience of that life stage, and the way that had repercussions for future stages.

Use developmental theory and your intersectionality to unpack the way various identity characteristics and cultural frameworks have shaped their life trajectories. Include quotes (paraphrased is ok) from your interview to support your argument.

You do NOT have to tell us the name or your relationship to the person you interviewed to protect their privacy. You may use a fake name or pseudonym for them.

Part 1: The Interview

First, select someone for the interview.

Second, create an interview guide, or a list of questions that you will use in the interview to guide the conversation towards topics that arose in our class. Strong interview questions are open ended and often are phrased not as questions but as invitations to “tell me about…” something. For example, rather than saying “Did you like your parents?” a stronger interview question would be “Tell me about your relationship with your parents…” It may also be wise to prepare “probes” or follow up questions that get at details that may be relevant. Probes can be more pointed than your initial questions. A probe for the previous question might be “Was there ever a time when you felt your parents expected you to make choices for the good of your family rather than your own good?” You should have at least 8-10 questions.

After conducting the interview, the third step is analyzing the interview. What did you learn about their experience and how does it relate to the themes in our course?

Try to identify three themes from our course that the interviewee’s experiences illustrate.

Try to understand what resources, beliefs, attitudes, or relationships shaped a person’s life, and how those were particular to their sociocultural context.

Part 2: Report

After conducting and analyzing your interview, summarize what you have found. Include concrete examples from your interview, like quotes (that can be paraphrased), to support your argument.

A strong way to start your report would be to introduce the person and provide an overview of their experience living a formative period of their life in another culture and the themes that you found in their narrative. Then proceed to discuss the themes you identified in detail, drawing on examples from the interview.

In the text, include 3 citations to class material and 1 citations from outside of class material that are relevant to themes that arise in your interview (and that are academic citations from peer-reviewed journals or academic publishers in the case of books).